LADERA RANCH, Calif.—In 2019, Kara Bell began firing off a series of emails to her homeowners association, hoping to find out what kind of herbicides gardeners were using on the many sports fields, pocket parks, and schools that pepper the hillside community of Ladera Ranch, a private enclave in the southeastern corner of unincorporated Orange County.
Like many residents, Bell was drawn to the safety and family amenities in this master-planned community, which sits just above an arroyo on historic ranchland in Southern California.
“We loved it. Everything was great. It’s an amazing community,” she told The Epoch Times.
Walking her son to school one day, she saw a man fully covered in protective equipment, spraying the sidewalks. Bell said her inquiries indicated that the landscaping company contracted by the homeowners association was not warning residents before applying pesticides, including on school fields. She said that when she asked what, where, and how much they were spraying, she was stonewalled.
After much prodding, the state’s pesticide regulator eventually assured her the company would face consequences for future violations of a state law requiring it to report pesticide use at schools.
“It was constant violations,” she said. “And our HOA, anytime I would report, they would kind of push back and say, ‘Well, we have to do it because the community wants it to look like Disneyland,’ and ‘We can’t have any weeds,’ and ‘It’s too expensive to go non-toxic’—just giving us all the excuses.”
The allusion is material: Ladera Ranch’s primary landscape maintenance contractor was founded by a former landscape manager for Disneyland Resort in nearby Anaheim. Like the theme park, the suburb is arranged in interconnected “villages” whose vaguely anachronistic façades evoke a nebulous, cartoon mashup of small-town Americana. Its sports fields, strip malls, community centers, hillsides and parks, playgrounds and splash pads are all obsessively manicured, every bit of the plant life spaced, shaped, and tamed according to plan.
As she pushed to obtain pesticide records, Bell became alarmed at reports of neighbors losing their dogs prematurely to cancer. Then, there seemed to be an explosion of rare cancer cases in a human population of around 25,000.
“At the time,” Bell said, “we were getting reports of breast cancer, stomach cancer, colon cancer, thyroid cancer, brain cancer, and a large number of strokes. Also non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma was coming up quite a bit in children of elementary school age and middle school.”
Following the death earlier this year of Brody Matteson, a 17-year-old Ladera Ranch resident who suffered secondary cancers from treatment for Ewing sarcoma, national media picked up the story—at least six cases of the same exceedingly rare pediatric cancer had stricken young residents in the last decade.
In July, U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli announced an Environmental Protection Agency investigation, and Ladera Ranch’s homeowners association issued a 60-day ban on the routine use of herbicides.
At the same time, a broader movement to phase out toxic pesticides has been gaining momentum in the region, much of which consists of heavily landscaped, master-planned communities like Ladera Ranch.
Facing pressure from residents who say they have found discrepancies between public reporting and internal records, Orange County recently enacted a temporary ban on synthetic pesticides in its waterways. But as it grapples with a broader policy shift, resistance is appearing from unlikely sources.
Residents who have been lobbying to expose and end heavy pesticide use in Ladera Ranch, at least since 2016, say the writing was on the wall long before the EPA investigation. They claim their demands for transparency and action have either fallen on deaf ears or been ignored or suppressed.
As Bell continued to query the HOA, state agencies, and contractors for records, she found more alarming details. O’Connell, a landscaping company that has been on Ladera Ranch’s payroll for two decades—billing the community around $4.2 million in 2019—told her they stopped using the controversial weed killer glyphosate in 2016. However, records reviewed by The Epoch Times appear to show applications continued in 2019.
In early August, other landscaping contractors in Ladera Ranch posted notices of intent to spray the herbicide, which the International Agency for Research on Cancer and the State of California have classified as a probable human carcinogen, a characterization disputed by the EPA.
Seven years ago, chemical experts employed by O’Connell assured Bell her children’s schools were not being sprayed, and products they were using were non-toxic—both of which turned out to be false, she said. “They were basically just gaslighting me.”
Undeterred, she reported back to her fledgling mom group.
“Someone said, ‘Wow, it’s going to take somebody dying before something happens.’ And fast-forward seven years, there are reports of children dying,” she said.
A Canary in the Coal Mine
On a recent summer day, Liesl Heidt walked her 10-year-old Chow-Chow-Collie mix, Mari, over to the Wagsdale Dog Park, a perfectly trimmed, verdant stretch next to her apartment building on a main thoroughfare in Ladera Ranch.
“It’s her favorite place. Even though she doesn’t really play much, she still wants to come here and sit and watch the other dogs and, you know, feel the wind blowing in her hair,” Heidt said.
Mari picked a shady spot and settled in, content despite the massive adrenal and liver tumors protruding from her abdomen and hindering her movement.
“A lot of dogs in the park started getting cancer, maybe around 2019,” said Heidt, who used to bring Mari daily.
She joined a Facebook group where residents posted concerns and shared photos that they said showed O’Connell trucks spraying herbicide.
When her neighbor got adrenal cancer, rare among both humans and dogs, she began wondering if there was a link.
Just days after her interview with The Epoch Times—and two weeks after Ladera Ranch Maintenance Corp. implemented the 60-day suspension—Heidt was shocked when a landscaper contracted by her apartment building’s management company posted a notice of intent to spray glyphosate.
Ladera Ranch Maintenance Corp., the private community’s umbrella homeowners association, does not manage or have authority over apartment communities and sub-associations.
“I was literally outside this morning warning my neighbors who were walking dogs. None of them had seen the notice,” which was posted one day prior, Heidt said.
After neighbors vented their outrage on Facebook, the management company emailed to clarify that the notice was issued in error and that there would be no spraying.
As their concerns mounted over the years, Ladera Ranch residents kept a running list of canine cancer incidents, currently counting around 43 cases.
In many ways, animals, especially dogs, interact more intimately with the landscapes in which we live—smelling, tasting, moving low to the ground, and absorbing through their paw pads. The idea that they are sentinels, capable of serving as a surveillance tool to monitor risks to human health, is not new.
The proverbial “canary in the coal mine” comes from an old practice of introducing the birds, which are sensitive to poisonous gases, into a mine before entering to gauge its toxicity.
Dogs and Pesticides
For decades, researchers have known that pesticide exposures are associated with increased risk for common canine cancers, among other ailments.
Dogs are particularly sensitive to herbicides such as 2,4-D—a weed killer used extensively in commercial landscaping—known to increase risk for canine malignant lymphoma, a common cancer among dogs and a model for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in humans.
Other studies have found both 2,4-D and glyphosate are lymphoid genotoxins in dogs, adding to extensive animal research showing links between 2,4-D and endocrine disruption, renal and hepatic toxicity, developmental and reproductive toxicity, genetic mutation and cancer—and to epidemiological and other studies linking glyphosate with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Records reviewed by The Epoch Times appear to indicate O’Connell continued to use glyphosate and 2,4-D in 2019, but it has also relied heavily in recent years on glufosinate—a neurotoxic pesticide known to induce seizures in animals and humans, and dogs are particularly sensitive. The European Union banned glufosinate in 2018.
A study published this year suggested several common pesticides, including glyphosate, can damage human DNA—a primary trigger in cancer causation—even at low doses.
Chronic, low-dose exposures to pesticides—the kind you might get when walking your dog or playing on a sports field every day—are less understood than acute exposures, which are more easily demonstrated in lab studies.
Disease latency and other factors make it difficult to demonstrate causation in humans, but dogs have a compressed lifespan and relatively rapid disease progression. Because hundreds of diseases diagnosed in domestic dogs are analogous to human diseases, scientists see pet dogs as a unique model that can signal impacts of shared genomics and environmental exposures.
Residents sounding the alarm in Ladera Ranch for more than a decade have made this point to the homeowners association and government officials, referencing their sick animals and attaching photos of dead wildlife in escalating email chains.
Mysterious Seizures
Courtney Harris, who moved to Ladera Ranch with her family in 2019, said both her dogs came down with mysterious seizure conditions after eating grass outside her apartment complex.
“My daughter and my son both have medical conditions, so in 2021 we got Shoestrings, a Saint Bernard, as a service dog for my son, to alert us when things were off,” Harris told The Epoch Times.
Shoestrings began having seizures in 2023; scans revealed no obvious causes, and he died at 4 1/2.
“For two years until he passed away, he was on a total of 40 pills daily trying to control the seizures. Towards the end, he would have one and go right back into one,” she said, recalling the dog suffering 16 seizures in a day. ”He wasn’t able to stand, he couldn’t hold his bladder.”
This year, her family took in Beethoven, another St. Bernard. “We brought the dog here from Arizona in April. He had no issues, there was never anything wrong,” she said. “Then July 9, he went out and ate the grass. Two days later, he had seizures.”
She said she reached out to O’Connell, the landscaping company, to ask what pesticides they might have used on the area. “They were like, ‘No, we’re not giving you any information,’” she said.
She said she later learned they had sprayed with the controversial herbicide dicamba on July 7, two days before Beethoven ate grass she suspected correlated to the onset of his seizures.
Throughout July, other contractors were routinely spraying as many as 13 insecticides on “main sites,” recreation areas, the dog park, and other common areas, as well as herbicides, including glufosinate, according to records reviewed by The Epoch Times.
Harrus said that at her post as a crossing guard, at an intersection between Ladera Ranch Maintenance Corp.’s offices, a community center, a school, and a sports park, she has long observed regular herbicide-spraying in areas filled with children.
“They’re out there all the time, and I’m like, ‘Hey! I’m sitting here, and kids are walking by, and you’re just spraying these chemicals,’” she said. “I’ve yelled at them a few times, asking if they can at least wait until we leave.”
Lynn, another resident and dog owner who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, moved to Ladera Ranch a few years ago. “It’s a community for kids—it’s picturesque. It’s perfect,” she said.
An older dog she had passed away shortly after moving here, of oral and throat cancer; she didn’t think much about environmental exposures.
Then last year, she got a specially trained service dog for her autistic son. After taking him to the dog park, she noticed allergy symptoms—fur loss, skin irritation, and constant ear infections. She took him to the vet and changed his diet, but it wasn’t until he spent time away from Ladera Ranch that the symptoms subsided.
“Everything healed. Then we brought him back and took him for a couple of walks in the grass, and we’re right back where we started,” she said, pointing to large lesions covering the dog’s groin area.
“They were spraying Roundup behind our houses without it being posted. That was March 13, 2025.”
In emails reviewed by The Epoch Times, a representative for O’Connell told a resident in 2019 that the company had stopped using glyphosate after it was added to California’s Prop 65 list in 2016. State records indicate glyphosate was added to the list in 2017.
Like many residents, Lynn has a long list of unanswered questions.
“Is it the pesticides? Or is it something deeper? Is it something in our water?” she said.
‘They Refused’
Jackie French, an attorney and Ladera Ranch resident, said she began to question pesticide use in the community a few years ago when a neighbor was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma. Three others followed, in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
“That was very alarming to me, but I didn’t really look into it. And then it was another mom whose son passed from Ewing’s this year in March; she posted on Facebook that she’d noticed there were too many people with cancer in Ladera, and people started commenting,” French said.
She reached out to the California Cancer Registry—now seven years after Bell’s inquiry—and to researchers around the country who study the disease.
The American Cancer Society identifies no lifestyle or environmental cause of Ewing sarcoma. That doesn’t mean the link doesn’t exist, French said.
“It just means there’s no studies being done,” she said. “And so I started putting together a list of all the potential environmental factors that I could come up with from my research, and then reaching out to more people who are experts saying, ‘Can you look into this?’”
She and other residents have looked into the community’s proximity to a landfill, abandoned oil wells, exposed power lines, and U.S. Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton.
“The consensus from all the people I talked to was to look into the water and the pesticides,” French said.
Sources who had worked on landscaping with the Ladera Ranch Maintenance Corp., she said, told her the community had a “very heavy spray schedule.” But when she set out to verify that, she hit a wall.
According to residents, at least 19 synthetic chemicals were being used in Ladera Ranch in June while Ladera Ranch Maintenance Corp. managed the community. She asked the homeowners association for usage amounts under the Davis–Stirling Act, a California law that grants homeowners a right to inspect homeowners association documents and records.
“They refused to give them,” she said. “I wrote it as an attorney. I’m demanding these documents. I got a contract that they had, and it said Exhibit 13 had information about pesticides, and that exhibit was the only one missing. So it really felt kind of suspicious to me.”
In an Aug. 6 email, a representative for First Service Residential, the management company for Ladera Ranch Maintenance Corp., informed a resident that neither the homeowners association nor O’Connell maintain pesticide application records identifying exact dates, times, locations, products, or other details for treatments performed by their subcontractors.
“This is insane to me!” Bell said. “They are still not keeping records.”
Companies are legally required to document how much and where they use pesticides and to report that information to the county, which then reports it to the Department of Pesticide Regulation.
French sent a public records request to the department in May, but it has not yet produced any usage reports.
“I think that’s when I started really getting concerned. You know, why can’t we get information about what’s being used and where it’s being sprayed and how much?” she said.
Ladera Ranch Maintenance Corp. and O’Connell did not respond to detailed inquiries from The Epoch Times, including requests for pesticide usage records.
The Department of Pesticide Regulation indicated it would comply with The Epoch Times’ requests for detailed use reports and enforcement records; responses are pending as of publication time.
In a July 17 notice to residents, the maintenance corporation clarified that herbicides and pesticides are not applied to “parks, playgrounds, sports fields or school sites where children and families regularly recreate as part of LARMAC’s current landscape maintenance program,” but rather treated with organic fertilizer and “cultural practices.”
Some are skeptical of such assurances.
“I don’t trust a word they say,” Bell said. “I believe the pesticide use records will show they have been treating Founder’s Park with herbicides.”
Cancer Investigation
At a July 21 community meeting, Ladera Ranch residents spoke about their loved ones, taken early by cancer, or about their own diagnoses.
Among them was Brian Dalton, whose daughter, Lily, was diagnosed with a rare cancer—not Ewing sarcoma but one driven by a mutation of the same underlying gene. She died at age 23, after a year-and-a-half of treatments.
“She never complained. She continued to smile to encourage others and to live with grace. … She chose hope,” Dalton said.
“What brings me here tonight is not just my family’s story; it is the growing number of families in this community asking the same heartbreaking question: Why are so many children and young adults developing incredibly rare cancers?”
Dalton said he thought about how much time his daughter spent in the community, the memories she made in Ladera Ranch. “I can’t help but wonder if there are other parents who are still unknowingly walking the same path that we walk,” he said.
In a July 30 email to The Epoch Times, the California Department of Public Health confirmed that its Cancer Registry, in coordination with the Cancer Registry of Greater California, is reviewing incidence data for the Ladera Ranch area related to concerns about Ewing sarcoma and other cancer types.
“We understand parents and community members in the Ladera Ranch area are concerned and we take those concerns seriously. Our role is to carefully evaluate the available evidence, share what we know transparently and continue working with our local partners as additional information becomes available,” the department wrote.
The review, which the department expects to complete this fall, will assess whether the number of diagnoses in the area appears higher than expected based on population-based cancer registry data.
The department reports fewer than 11 cases of Ewing sarcoma have been identified in Ladera Ranch between 1999 and 2023—a small sample that makes statistical analysis challenging.
The investigation will not determine whether environmental exposures are a cause.
Orange County has the highest overall rate of cancer incidence among people under 50 in Southern California, according to NIH data.
The California Cancer Registry collects data on every person diagnosed with cancer in the state, but French said that residents so far can’t get access to that “in any meaningful way” or on a city-by-city basis.
“It’s strange to me that the state of California has this information and that residents have to try to piece together what’s going on,” she said.
‘I Felt Like Erin Brockovich’
Carolyn McCuan, founder of Toxic Free OC, moved to Aliso Viejo, a master-planned community not far from Ladera Ranch, in 2020 with her husband and two young children.
At the time, creating a pesticide watchdog organization, she said, was “not on my bingo card.”
But after her health started declining and she watched men in hazmat suits spray the slopes behind her property, she began to put things together.
She said she believes her family was “inadvertently poisoned because of the chronic use of herbicides” at a park right behind her house.
Both she and her children had a collection of symptoms that seemed to show up out of nowhere.
“Then my dog passed, and we didn’t know what it was. So finally I had testing done,” McCuan said.
Everything came back negative until her doctor recommended a toxins test, which showed high levels of herbicides.
“I started speaking to neighbors about this—I felt like Erin Brockovich. I started going door to door and telling them about what’s going on with my family, and at about every other house, somebody had cancer, somebody beat cancer, somebody’s dog died, somebody’s dog had cancer,” she said.
“It was a huge issue in our whole neighborhood. And it became this big grassroots movement.”
She began asking her homeowners association for pesticide use records. When it did not provide them, she reached out to the county’s agricultural commissioner and the state’s pesticide regulator and received some monthly reports, but they were “bare,” missing key details, and often wrong, she said.
Residents compiled a list of neighbors and dogs who had been diagnosed with cancers—breast, thyroid, sarcoma—and other ailments.
“We know it’s from the herbicides. We were all going to the parks, taking our dogs for walks. And all these dogs had some kind of organ failure,” McCuan said.
Causation has not been established by any regulatory or scientific investigation to date.
Toxic-Free OC joined other residents in urging the Aliso Viejo Community Association, the homeowners association, to cease using synthetic pesticides while it conducts research into several options. They wrote letters and gave dozens of speeches at board meetings.
In 2023, a board member informed McCuan via email that a group of residents had come forward six years earlier with similar requests, but the projected cost of organic landscaping—$1.3 million in 2018—was too high.
The following year, the homeowners association issued a report that McCuan asserts contained claims downplaying pesticide applications, which she says are contradicted by spray records from the prior year.
The only option left, she thought, was a lawsuit. But after interviewing several lawyers, McCuan and her husband decided they’d rather spend the money on a new house down payment and moved to San Juan Capistrano, a city with an organics-first landscaping policy.
“After two years of this, we were just exhausted,” she said.
But the problem, McCuan added, is much bigger than either community.
‘Tip of the Iceberg’
Orange County currently has an “organics first” integrated pest management program for its parks that in practice has been anything but, McCuan said.
“From records requests, we are still seeing that they’re using a lot of Roundup,” she said.
In San Juan Capistrano, “they weren’t using any organics at all until we found out and called them out and started working with Public Works at the end of 2025 on the issue,” she said.
McCuan said she printed pages of xeroxed pesticide use reports from landscapers and lining up the product names. She found “It’s 90 percent Roundup.”
Records reviewed by The Epoch Times show consistent use of the product, and some glufosinate, in the city’s public spaces throughout 2023, 2024, and 2025.
“Then you have companies like O’Connell who put on their signs that they’re proudly glyphosate-free, but then they use glufosinate and other chemicals that are actually even more toxic,” she said.
With state pesticide regulation focused on agriculture, she added, “in these urban areas, we don’t really have any county or state oversight.”
Bethany Nelms, a co-founder of the nonprofit Creek Team OC, has been fighting herbicide use in the county for years, but said she was “shocked” to discover the scale of violations and abuse around six months ago.
“There’s no enforcement. There’s no oversight. They have all these wonderful policies, but no one follows them,” she told The Epoch Times.
Nelms and her teams have pulled records for half a dozen cities in the county and compared them with contracts, finding what they describe as significant discrepancies.
Recordkeeping is scant, and both local and state agencies have either been slow to respond or have stopped complying, she said. In the meantime, municipalities that have adopted more organic practices are backsliding.
“They just continually have increased the volume they used with no explanation,” Nelms said.
Nelms notes the task is daunting: Orange County has around 5,000 homeowners associations, covering more than 80 percent of the population, much of them governing heavily landscaped, master-planned communities like Ladera Ranch.
What’s required, Nelms said, is not just reducing synthetic herbicides, but a “full comprehensive mentality shift.”
“A lot of plants that were introduced into the Southern California landscape here, they’re not supposed to be here,” Nelms said. “They’re not drought tolerant. They’re not California natives. It’s very difficult to keep them up. … If cities and counties embrace the native plant mentality, it would make our soil better. It would make the fire risk less, the water use less.”
Ladera Ranch, she suggests, is only the tip of the iceberg.
“It’s an absolute tragedy, and it should not be happening. But it is putting a spotlight on something that people have been working on for a long time,” she said.
‘Players at the Table’
McCuan recently joined a special advisory committee created by the Orange County Board of Supervisors to address community concerns over its integrated pest management program.
She said the dozen or so stakeholders at these closed-door meetings include government and nonprofit actors, including the Laguna Canyon Foundation and The Irvine Ranch Conservancy, which she said advocate for continued use of glyphosate and other pesticides.
Public records reviewed by The Epoch Times indicate that both wildland conservation nonprofits used primarily synthetic pesticides, including glyphosate, in treating nine popular public parks, trails, and open spaces from January 2024 through June 2026.
Efforts to phase out these products, even in Irvine, which has had a nontoxic landscaping policy for the last decade, are still an uphill battle, McCuan said.
“I think people have the misconception that Irvine is completely organic, which is not true. They use synthetics at [parks] and in their wildland habitats and conservation spaces,” she said.
A clause in the city’s 2024 contract allowed reintroduction of Roundup, the use of which increased significantly in 2025, according to an annual pest management report.
“It’s a slippery slope. Once you allow a little bit, they just open the floodgates,” McCuan said.
As the county bears down on actual policy decisions, the rift between those who want to end synthetic pesticides and those who rely on them is increasingly bare.
In a 40-page internal slide presentation reviewed by The Epoch Times, the Laguna Canyon Foundation outlines how to deal with what it calls “emotional” anti-pesticide activists and counter what it characterizes as misinformation, including claims such as “Roundup pollutes the water” and “Organic herbicides are safer and better for wildlife.”
At the advisory committee’s first meeting, McCuan and other members noted the presence of a guest who was not on the invite-only email list.
“She’s sitting next to the Laguna Canyon Foundation guy, and everything she says is, ‘We’ve been able to successfully use Roundup to control invasive species and still protect endangered species in the area,’” McCuan said.
Cheryl Wilen, the attendee in question, is a botanist and weed scientist who has advised Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties on their integrated pest management programs. She is also a former employee of Monsanto, the original manufacturer of Roundup.
The Laguna Canyon Foundation, The Irvine Ranch Conservancy, and Wilen did not respond to requests for comment from The Epoch Times.
Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley, who has spearheaded support for pesticide use reform at the county level and convened the committee, did not respond to inquiries about Wilen’s involvement.
A Model for Change
In 2019, Kara Bell wrote an email to First Service Residential, the company Ladera Ranch Maintenance Corp. contracts to manage its affairs. She attached a photo of a dead bobcat, with manicured shrubbery in the background:
“I am kindly writing you to let you know that Non Toxic Ladera has seen enough. In the past three years we have come to you with requests to stop the unnecessary spraying of toxic chemicals in our community. We have attended private meetings as well as public HOA meetings, but sadly the assault on our environment continues,” Bell wrote.
“Dogs are dying prematurely and kids are sick, cancer is more common than in other communities and people are being assaulted by chemicals on a daily basis. Today the sight of the dead Bobcat is a sign that our group is not doing enough, I give you my word that this is going to change.”
Now, residents hope all the attention on Ladera Ranch will be a catalyst for something bigger.
“Hopefully it will be a model for what other cities need to be doing as well,” French said. “We can’t just depend on government officials to keep us safe—we have to be advocating for our own wellness.”
The question of causation, pesticide critics say, is irrelevant: If safer alternatives are available, why not use them?
John Gresko, a member of Ladera Ranch’s civic council who has helped organize recent demands to end heavy pesticide use, told The Epoch Times that he and other community members won’t be content to stop at Ladera, or even Orange County.
“We’re going to be seeking a statewide [pesticide] ban because we have the national spotlight on Ladera Ranch, and we’re really looking for a response that’s of the same scale and magnitude. So we’re trying to gather all the experts and all the efforts and everything into one cohesive voice,” Gresko said.
On a recent visit, he admired the view from Founders Park. There was a bluebird sky, and the sounds of children playing at the splash pad nearby.
“Welcome to Ladera,” he said. “Try to stay off the grass.”
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